ISTQB® Foundation Syllabus 2018 V3.1 is a minor update of the release 2018. A separate Release Note 2018 V3.1 have been created with an overview per chapter. Additionally a version of the Foundation Syllabus 2018 V3.1 with track changes has been release, ISTQB® Foundation Syllabus 2018 is a major update and rewrite of release 2011. For this reason, there are no detailed release notes per chapter and section. However, a summary of principal changes is provided here. Additionally, in a separate Release Notes document, ISTQB® provides traceability between the learning objectives in the 2011 version of the Foundation Level Syllabus and the learning objectives in the 2018 version of the Foundation Level Syllabus, showing which have been added,
updated, or removed.
At the start of 2017 more than 550,000 people in more than 100 countries have taken the foundation exam, and more than 500,000 are certified testers worldwide. With the expectation that all of them have read the Foundation Syllabus to be able to pass the exam, this makes the Foundation Syllabus likely to be the most read software testing document ever!
This major update is made in respect of this heritage and to improve the value the ISTQB® delivers to the next 500,000 people in the global testing community.
In this version, all learning objectives have been edited to make them atomic, and to create clear traceability from each learning objective to the content section(s) (and exam questions) that are related to that learning objective, and to have clear traceability from the content section(s) (and exam questions) back to the associated learning objective. In addition, the chapter time allocations have been made more realistic than those in the 2011 version of the syllabus, by using proven heuristics and formulas used with other ISTQB® syllabi, which are based on an analysis of the learning objectives to be covered in each chapter.
While this is a Foundation syllabus, expressing best practices and techniques that have withstood the test of time, we have made changes to modernize the presentation of the material, especially in terms of software development methods (e.g., Scrum and continuous deployment) and technologies (e.g., the Internet of Things). We have updated the referenced standards to make them more recent as follows:
- ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 replaces IEEE Standard 829.
- ISO/IEC 25010 replaces ISO 9126.
- ISO/IEC 20246 replaces IEEE 1028.
In addition, since the ISTQB® portfolio has grown dramatically over the last decade, we have added extensive cross-references to related material in other ISTQB® syllabi, where relevant, as well as carefully reviewing for alignment with all syllabi and with the ISTQB® Glossary. The goal is to make this version easier to read, understand, learn, and translate, focusing on increasing practical usefulness and the balance between knowledge and skills.
For a detailed analysis of the changes made in the Foundation Syllabus 2018 release, see the ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level Release Notes 2018.
